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Courtesy of Confluence Greenway
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Natalie Johnson makes picking up trash fun. The “Clean Water Americorps Member” of the Confluence Greenway (her official title) supervised the group’s annual “Trash Bash” near the end of March.
About 560 volunteers convened in two areas—the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge area, and the Creve Coeur Lake environs. They put on sturdy gloves, and commenced to putting all the crap people tend to throw away near waterways into plastic bags to be hauled away to an actual trash facility.
The volunteers are essentially doing what our mothers did for us when we were babies—cleaning up after us. Except we’re not babies anymore—most of us, anyway.
Each year, the Trash Bash hands out awards for the “Biggest,” “Most Valuable,” and “Weirdest” pieces of trash removed. In the interests of naked curiosity, I called Ms. Johnson, and she eagerly recapped the big winners.
At Creve Coeur Lake, the Biggest dumped item was—no surprise here—a boat. The Most Valuable piece of trash was a spool of copper wire (eat your hearts out, scrap-metal thieves). And the Weirdest was a three-way tie between a gumball machine, a ceramic gnome, and a folding chair, which conjures a backwoods tableau worthy of a Zen koan.
Throwing stuff off bridges is as American as driving drunk on Saturday night. And under portions of the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge, the noble volunteers recovered a vanity mirror, which won as the Biggest. The Most Valuable was a bag of marijuana. It’s not hard to imagine how that one got tossed away in the night, right about the time the Missouri Highway Patrol car’s flashers went on behind the dumper-in-question. Finally, the weirdest was a bathroom sink.
This year’s weirdest ain’t got nothing on last year’s, when Johnson and friends discovered a prosthetic leg in the brush.
Oh Lordy, do we have problems down here.
Here are some outtakes from Trash Bash 2011, courtesy of the Confluence Greenway Flickrstream:
